This invention relates to hitches for ganging lawn mowers and particularly to hitches connecting additional lawn mowers to tractors with mower attachments, the hitches permitting the ganged mowers to follow different slopes, but maintaining the axes of the ganged mowers always in the same direction.
Before rotary mowers were used extensively, reel type mowers were ganged and pulled by tractors. The hitches that were used to connect the mowers to the tractors comprised cross bars having connecting devices for connecting the mowers at intervals along the bars. Hitches such as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,830,421 issued to W. J. Blue et al on Apr. 15, 1958, had pivotal sections to permit the reel type mowers to follow various contours. However, a hitch of that construction is not as satisfactory for rotary type mowers as it is for reel type mowers for each rotary mower must rotate about its lateral axis to a much greater extent to follow substantial changes in contour of ground along its path of travel. Neither does that type of hitch nor a hitch for ganging rotary mowers as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,514,126 issued to W. H. Fuss on May 26, 1970 maintain the fore-to-aft axes of the pulled mowers and the tractors in the same direction, and as a result, the overlap of the swaths of the mowers is not uniform, but varies greatly while the mowers are being turned or pulled over terrain with different slopes.